Mind

The mind is a general term for the way a person that thinks, reasons, perceives, wills, and feels. For science, what others call the mind is entirely caused by workings of the brain. The philosopher Gilbert Ryle called mind the "Ghost in the Machine". He said the idea that it was separate from the brain was the mistaken "Official Doctrine".[1][2] However, some think that mind is separate from the body and is called a soul (see dualism).

Many people argue about what makes up the mind. Some say that only reason and memory are part of the mind, because they are conscious. In this view the emotions like love, hate, fear and joy are different from the mind. Some people with this view say the emotions are part of the heart. Others argue that our rational and emotional states cannot be separated and should all be part of what we call the mind.

People often use mind to mean the same as thought: the way we talk to ourselves "inside our heads". This is where the sayings "make up our minds," "change our minds" and "of two minds" come from. One of the important things of the mind in this sense is that it is private. No one else can "know our mind."

The original meaning of the Old Englishgemynd was memory. This explains the sayings call to mind, come to mind, keep in mind, to have mind of, and so on. Old English had other words to express what we call "mind" today, such as hyge, meaning "mind, spirit". The word mind gradually grew to mean all conscious thought over the 14th and 15th centuries.[3]

Just like the body, a mind can be healthy. The measure of this is called mental health. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), there is not one way to measure mental health in all people, because there are many things in our surroundings that might make what is mentally healthier different from one person to another. In general, most experts agree that "mental health" and "mental illness" are not opposites. In other words, not having a mental illness does not mean you are in good mental health.

One way to think about mental health is by looking at how well a person lives. Signs of mental health include: feeling capable and happy, being able to handle normal levels of stress, making and keeping friends, and leading an independent life, and being able to recover from difficult situations.

Philosophy of mind is the branch of philosophy that studies the nature of the mind and how it is linked to the body. The main problem is how the mind is related to the body, but there are also questions about the nature of the mind that do not talk about its relation to the physical body.[4]

Idealists think that the mind is all that exists and that the outside world is actually made up by the mind. Physicalists think that everything can be expressed by what is physical. Neutral monists believe that everything can be either mental or physical depending how you see it. For example, a red spot on a wall is physical, because it is an actual thing depending on the physical wall, but it is mental because our brain responds to the colour. The most common monisms in the 20th and 21st centuries have all been different kinds of physicalism, including behaviorism.[1][2][4]